Description

Isolation is a main factor of stress that threatens urban resilience. Research on urban isolation has been focusing on the residence places without enough examination of the movements of urban dwellers. Treating urban neighborhoods as nodes and urban dwellers as links, we propose to understand urban mobility from a network perspective. The project aims to quantify, understand, and explore the resilience of geosocial networks by utilizing a unique, publicly available Twitter data across the 50 largest population centers in the United States. The objectives of the project include: 1) integrating large-scale urban informatics to examine urban mobility and the emerged geosocial networks; 2) systematically simulating different types of perturbation to urban geosocial networks; and 3) quantifying the impact of the perturbations on urban neighborhoods. The granularity and scale of this project will enable unprecedented quantitative examination of urban geosocial networks. Also, it will provide a new network analysis approach to examine urban resilience.

I am an Assistant Professor at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Northeastern University and the Associate Research Director of the Boston Area Research Initiative (BARI), Harvard University. I study the interplay between urban informatics and urban, infrastructure, and social resilience. My research focuses on two interrelated areas: human movement perturbation under the influence of natural and manmade disasters (collaborating with Georgia Tech and Virginia Tech), and geosocial networks in big cities (collaborating with Harvard University). The study of New Yorkers' mobility during Hurricane Sandy is reported by CityLab, from The Atlantic.

Before joining in Northeastern, I was a postdoc fellow at the Department of Sociology, Harvard University. There, I found my research interests in studying social inequality and segregation using the "big data" from Twitter by working with Prof. Robert Sampson and Mario Small. I received my Ph.D. degree from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Virginia Tech. My advisor was Prof. John Taylor, director of the Network Dynamics lab. During my time at Virginia Tech, I was also the first Ph.D. Fellow at BioBuild, an interdisciplinary program, and a Via Teaching Fellow. I obtained my M.S. in Construction Management from Michigan State University and B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Tianjin University (China).

Qi (Ryan) Wang

Assistant Professor at Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Associate Director of Research on Social Media at Boston Area Research Initiative

I am an Assistant Professor at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Northeastern University and the Associate Research Director of the Boston Area Research Initiative (BARI), Harvard University. I study the interplay between urban informatics and urban, infrastructure, and social resilience. My research focuses on two interrelated areas: human movement perturbation under the influence of natural and manmade disasters (collaborating with Georgia Tech and Virginia Tech), and geosocial networks in big cities (collaborating with Harvard University). The study of New Yorkers' mobility during Hurricane Sandy is reported by CityLab, from The Atlantic.

Before joining in Northeastern, I was a postdoc fellow at the Department of Sociology, Harvard University. There, I found my research interests in studying social inequality and segregation using the "big data" from Twitter by working with Prof. Robert Sampson and Mario Small. I received my Ph.D. degree from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Virginia Tech. My advisor was Prof. John Taylor, director of the Network Dynamics lab. During my time at Virginia Tech, I was also the first Ph.D. Fellow at BioBuild, an interdisciplinary program, and a Via Teaching Fellow. I obtained my M.S. in Construction Management from Michigan State University and B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Tianjin University (China).